Saturday, May 5, 2012

I think my first experience with music from the Beastie Boys
happened sometime in the very early 90s. I was looking at some kind of collection
of work by Glen E Friedman. I didn’t really get that they weren’t just some
random skateboarders in the back of thrasher in the music section. I honestly
don’t remember what I thought at first, but I do know that Friedman’s iconic
photo of the 90s Beastie Boys would become such a symbol for my formative years
as a skateboarder. I remember my friend Grant letting me borrow the Check Your
Head album, which was unlike anything I’d ever heard. I think that at that
point in time, the Beastie Boys had become the third band I had really gotten
into, following the Smiths and the Cure. I remember how stoked I was to get that
full sized poster and just have it in my room.

Over the years the Beastie Boys saw a number of evolutions
in style, from their early punk and hip hop tracks to their distortion laden
tracks of the 90s, to their modern style of Straight up Hip Hop. Their style
has always been consistently their own, and that’s something anyone could tell
after watching them perform. As they got older, their lyrics became stronger,
their messages clearer, and their imagery louder. I remember some of the most
significant and respectable messages I can remember coming from Yauch on 1994’
Sure Shot, where he puts himself past his humorous yet misogynist days with the
lyric:

"I
want to say something that's long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to
be through / To all the mothers and sisters and the wives and friends / I want
to offer my love and respect to the end."

Anyway, the point of this post was not to prove a point
about how much I loved the Beastie Boys, it was to say that the recent loss of
Adam Yauch, aka MCA, is something tragic to me. Cancer is obviously nothing to
joke about, and it’s affected some of the closest people to me in my life.
Yauch had been fighting cancer in his parotid gland since 2009, which I had discovered
while listening to NPR’s interview with him that year.

Following diagnosis, Yauch became a vegan and considered
himself to be on the road to recovery, under the assistance of his Tibetan
doctors. (Yauch was a devoted Buddhist, by the way.) Tragically, it seems his
treatments weren’t enough--Adam Yauch died on May 4th, 2012. (Yesterday,
as I write this.) His death was sudden, sad and surprising, considering how
little we’ve heard about him in the past few years. I can’t imagine growing up
with the music he helped perform, and I’m thankful for the music he made. I’ll
never forget the way he played bass on Sabotage
while performing at the MTV music awards, and I’ll never forget Nathanial
Hornblower, either. Thanks for everything, MCA. I’ll miss you. We all will.